DEMO’s Shipley: I have no feud with TechCrunch

Chris Shipley, the face behind the startup launchpad DEMO, sat down with me at The Triple Door last night to talk about the Seattle tech market, trends in technology and the recent dust up with TechCrunch. (For those who missed the drama, TechCrunch50 and DEMO will hold their conferences on overlapping dates this fall.)

A lot of Seattle startups have come through DEMO over the years. What’s your take on the tech market here?

“It makes a lot of sense. There is this great genealogy if you think about it, coming out of Microsoft and other firms and if you dial the wayback machine way back to Microrim and some of these types of companies. People who are entrepreneurs have to go create things. And if you are inside a big company like Microsoft you may be able to do something like that on some product basis, but large companies have to serve entrenched customer bases. And to really break away and do something new often means leaving and starting it.”

On how Google and Microsoft are perceived in Silicon Valley:

“(Google) is kind of this new monster. In a lot of ways, in this economy … Google has far more influence and power over who will or won’t be successful, then I think Microsoft ever did…. Google is the new Microsoft in that regard, the new bogey man. I don’t think the change is just because there is a new bad guy in town. Microsoft has put a tremendous amount of effort in Silicon Valley.”

What is up with the feud with TechCrunch over the upcoming conferences?

“I have no feud with TechCrunch. It was a big kerfuffle. As I said at the outset, I don’t think it is good for entreprenuers to have a split audience. But I think they are really different events. I think TechCrunch is about saying, ‘here are a handful of companies that may or may not have been well screened by our committee, but take a look at them and here is a small army of others that have come to show their wares….’ If you are shopping for a company to flip or an early investment, particularly in the Web 2.0 space, it probably makes a lot of sense.

DEMO is about launching products that by our estimation have the opportunity to be really significant, really game changing in the marketplace… Our ambition with DEMO is to get those products and those companies closer to customers, not necessarily to get them closer to the buzz of Silicon Valley.

I think they are different, they are for different stages of companies…. They should be able to peacefully co-exist in my way of thinking, but apparently not by everyone’s way of thinking.”

Why charge $18,000 and have you thought about lowering the fees for entrepreneurs?

“That charge is leveled as if we held these young companies at gunpoint and we are taking food from their children’s mouths.

In fact, we work really hard with companies that we think ought to be at DEMO to help them find sources of funding in advance of the event so that they actually are ready –not just to pay our fee — but to put the investment into going to market. You can build a very capital efficient company today on a Visa card credit limit.

It’s a much harder thing to build a sustainable company that way. In some ways, that fee and the ability to pay it says you are in a position now to actually do right by your customers. You’ve got the resources to do that. Over the years I have done the event, I can think of one person in 12 years who said ‘I don’t think I got my full measure.'”

How are you feeling about the dust up?

“No one wants to be misunderstood by the market by that just means I have more work to do. I am more than willing to take that on.

We have to make sure we deliver value to the companies we engage with and the people who come to our event, and if we don’t do that, we deserve what we get. But we are a putting all of our effort and resources into making sure that our customers and clients are really, really successful and the results would suggest that we do a good job of that.”

On Seattle and Silicon Valley:

“My sense is that Silicon Valley is perceived as the great epicenter of startups, because there is so much activity and there are so many networks and so many places for people to engage. It appears that there is a tremendous amount of support, because there is.

But in some ways, I think it can be surface because people are involved in so much and they are involved in their own thing and there is the expectation that there is a bell curve and some will be wildly successful, some will fail and others will muddle along. I think there is an ideal here to change the statistics in Seattle so that we are really driving more toward success…. The other thing … is that everybody kind of knows everybody. In Silicon Valley, everybody thinks they should know everybody…

Competing in Silicon Valley does require a tremendous amount of toughness, but I also think it is really arrogant to believe that only Silicon Valley is able to produce top quality technology companies.”

Are you here looking for new companies?

I am always looking at companies…

What are your favorite Seattle Web sites?

“I love the site and have spent way too much time on I Can Has Cheezburger. It is a cool site. It is fun.”